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After our supper, the captain conducted us under the piazza attached to the building, where we found eight hammocks suspended, as white as snow. There our host disinterred from a large bucket of ice several bottles of Madeira, which we sipped with great delight: the more so as, for our cane pipes and cheap Cavendish, Finn substituted a box of genuine Havanna cazadores. After our fatigues and starvation, it was more than comfortable it was delightful. The doctor vowed he would become a planter, the parson asked if there were any widows in the neighbourhood, and the lawyers inquired if the planters of the vicinity were any way litigious. By the bye, I have observed that Captain Finn was a celebrated character. As we warmed with the Madère frappé
The distance to be watched between the Havanna and Key West is only about sixty miles, while that in the other direction is not much greater. While the Swash was making the circuit of Jamaica, as described, her captain had little communication with his passengers.
Yet they went directly to the Havanna, the pilot Alaminos being over-persuaded into this measure, under pretence of Puertocarrero being sick, and that Montejo wanted to procure provisions from his estate of El Marien.
Among the rest, one propounded they should assault the town of El Puerto del Principe. This proposition he persuaded to, by saying he knew that place very well, and that being at a distance from sea, it never was sacked by any pirates, whereby the inhabitants were rich, exercising their trade by ready money, with those of Havanna who kept here an established commerce, chiefly in hides.
He tries a cigar a little later on as being more stylish a big black Havanna. It doesn't seem altogether to agree with him, for I find him sitting over a bucket in the back kitchen afterward, solemnly swearing never to smoke again. And now his mustache begins to be almost visible to the naked eye, whereupon he immediately takes to brandy-and-sodas and fancies himself a man.
So I did not smoke any then, though I did afterward upon the voyage, I am sorry to say. Notwithstanding I declined; with a good deal of unnecessary swearing, Ned assured me that the cigars were real genuine Havannas; for he had been in Havanna, he said, and had them made there under his own eye.
Havanna in the island of Cuba is to the southwards, and Florida to the northward, and between these are all the before mentioned islands, of Organos, Bahamas, Martyres, and Tortugas. Between Havanna and los Martyres, there is a channel with a violent current, twenty leagues over at the narrowest; and it is fourteen leagues from los Martyres to Florida.
And so this greeting passed between two friends who had not seen each other for months. Alphonse and Frederic would have rushed into each other's arms and shrieked Ce bon coeur! ce cher Alphonse! over each other's shoulders. Max and Wilhelm would have bestowed half a dozen kisses, scented with Havanna, upon each other's mustaches. "Well, young one!"
The most interesting case was that of Signor Antonio Meucci, an Italian emigrant, who produced a mass of evidence to show that in 1849, while in Havanna, Cuba, he experimented with the view of transmitting speech by the electric current. He continued his researches in 1852-3, and subsequently at Staten Island, U.S.; and in 1860 deputed a friend visiting Europe to interest people in his invention.
On the 10th of August it reached Barbadoes; on the 11th, the islands of Saint Vincent and Saint Lucia; on the 12th it touched the southern coast of Porto Rico; on the 13th it swept over part of Cuba; on the 14th it encountered Havanna; on the 17th it reached the northern shores of the Gulf of Mexico and travelled on to New Orleans, where it raged till the 18th.
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